Brand repositioning: what Man City Women kept and changed

September 13, 2026 · 5 min · Free, with full transcript

When should a brand that still works be repositioned, and how far can you go before you lose the people who built it? The answer here is that Manchester City Women rebranded for a sport that has outgrown its old identity, with top tier attendances more than tripled since 2019, and did it by keeping the sky blue, the crest and the club lineage while changing the signals that read junior partner. You get a test for separating load bearing brand assets from replaceable ones, the Gap 2010 logo reversal set against Burberry's protected check, and two measurement horizons: branded search and sentiment short term, new fans arriving without existing ones leaving long term.

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4 min

Chapters

Key takeaways

  • List the three brand elements your best customers would be angry to lose, protect those, and treat everything else as open to change.
  • Ask fans what they would riot over, usually colors, a crest, a chant or a founding story, rather than taglines and campaign fonts.
  • Judge a relaunch on branded search and sentiment in the short term, and on whether new fans arrive without the existing base leaving in the long term.
  • Cross-check vendor data such as SEMrush's branded search claims against your own traffic, since the vendor sells SEO analytics software.
  • Treat a launch announcement full of adjectives about the company rather than what changes for the customer as a warning sign.
Read the full transcript

Host:Welcome to the Leaders Insights Podcast. Today's episode, Man City, women's rebrand, repositioning a sports brand without losing the fans who built it. Man City women just rebranded and everyone's clapping. But rebrands usually mean someone screwed up the last one. So which is it? Fixing a mess or fixing something that wasn't broken?

Expert:Neither, and that's the interesting part. This is the rarer case, a brand that works today but won't fit the room they're walking into tomorrow. Women's football in England has gone from a curiosity to a proper commercial property in about five years. Attendances at the top tier have more than tripled since the 2019 season. If your identity was built for the small version of the sport, you'll be wearing a coat two sizes too small at exactly the moment you need to look the part.

Host:Fine, but we're rebranding for the future is what every consultant says before they set fire to a logo. What's the actual durable lesson here?

Expert:Don't cut the rope behind you. The people who built your brand when nobody was watching are the ones who will defend it when everybody is. City kept the core visual language, the sky blue, the connection to the men's setup, the club heritage, and evolved the parts that signaled junior partner. That's the discipline. You reposition the meaning without torching

Host:the memory. That sounds like a nice way of saying they were scared to actually change

Expert:anything. No, there's a real difference between timid and surgical. Gap tried a genuine full rebrand in 2010. New logo dropped it in six days after the backlash. That wasn't bravery. That was not understanding what the logo carried. Compare that to when Burberry cleaned up its identity, but protected the check pattern people actually bought the brand for. The skill isn't in how much you change. It's incorrectly identifying the two or three

Host:things you're not allowed to touch. So how does a marketing team know which threads

Expert:are load bearing and which are just old? You listen to where the emotion sits, not where the money sits. Ask fans what they'd riot over. Usually it's colors, a crest, a chant, a founding story, cheap things to keep, the expensive looking stuff, the taglines and the campaign fonts. Nobody's emotionally attached to those. City clearly worked out that the sky blue and the club lineage were sacred and the rest was negotiable. Get

Host:that map wrong and you delete the wrong thing. Let's talk numbers. How do you even measure

Expert:whether a rebrand landed beyond the fans didn't revolt? Two horizons. Short term, you watch search behavior and sentiment. SEMrush data suggests branded search, people typing your actual name into Google rather than generic terms, tends to spike around a well-run relaunch. Though I'd flag they sell SEO analytics software. So treat their framing as directional and cross-check against your own traffic. Long term, the real metric is whether new fans arrive without the existing ones leaving. That's the whole game. Growth that costs

Host:you your base isn't growth. It's a transplant. But isn't there a trap there? If you're so obsessed with not upsetting current fans, you never build for the newcomers who aren't

Expert:in the room yet. That's the exact tension and most brands get it backwards. They over-index on the loyalists and end up with an identity that feels like a members club, off-putting to anyone new. The move City is making is to signal ambition to people who've never watched a match, while keeping the handshake with people who watched when the stands were half empty. You're building a door, not a wall. The mistake is thinking you must choose one audience.

Host:Give me the tell. How do I spot a rebrand that's about to fail?

Expert:When the announcement talks entirely about the company and not the customer. We're bold, we're modern, we're reimagined. That's a brand talking to itself in a mirror. A good relaunch tells you what changes for you. The fan, the buyer. If the story is all adjectives

Host:about them, they haven't done the work. One thing people can actually use this week?

Expert:List the three elements of your brand your best customers would genuinely be angry to lose. Protect those with your life. Everything else is fair game and probably overdue for

Host:a rethink. Sources for today's episode. Semrush vendor SEO analytics tools marketing week digit day. That's a wrap. Fresh CMO briefings drop daily at MBA-training.com.

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